Submissions

Call for Articles Volume 12 Deadline: September 1st

Legal Communication & Rhetoric: JALWD invites submission of articles for its Volume 12 (Fall 2015) issue. Volume 12 will include articles on the full range of topics that fall within the mission of LC&R: JALWD: to be forum for discussion about legal writing and lawyering, between academe and the practicing bar.

LC&R’s mission is to advance the study of professional legal writing, broadly defined, and to become an active resource and a forum for conversation between the legal practitioner and the legal writing scholar. Traditionally,LC&R does not publish articles that are of interest to a purely academic or teaching audience. LC&R is dedicated to encouraging and publishing scholarship (1) focusing on the substance of legal writing; (2) grounded in legal doctrine, empirical research, or interdisciplinary theory; and (3) accessible and helpful to all “do-ers” of legal writing: attorneys, judges, law students, and legal academicians.

LC&R is published annually, thanks to the support of West, which printsLC&R, and of ALWD, which distributes LC&R by mail to some 4,000 practicing lawyers and judges; law school libraries, deans, and professors; and others interested in the field of legal writing. LC&R is available electronically on the ALWD website and from Westlaw, Lexis, SSRN, HeinOnLine, H.W. Wilson Company, and EBSCO. LC&R encourages submissions from law professors, practicing lawyers, and judges as well as from academics, researchers, and specialists in other disciplines. The deadline for submission of articles for the Fall 2015 issue is September 1, 2014.

General Guidelines

SUBMISSION OF ARTICLES

Submissions are due on or before September 1 of the calendar year before an upcoming issue. We welcome articles on any topic that falls within the mission of LC&R: to develop scholarship focusing on the substance and practice of professional legal writing, broadly defined to include many aspects of lawyering, and to make that scholarship accessible and helpful to practitioners as well as to legal academics. Without compromising analytical rigor and the necessary theoretical and research foundation, our goal is to publish articles that are readable and usable by the broader audience of professional legal writers. We are looking for clear, concrete, direct writing; strong, interesting, intelligent voices; and a style that uses the text for substance and the footnotes to provide support, sources, and references for additional study.

Potential authors may wish to consult articles published in past issues, as well as the more specific information for authors available on this page.

LC&R prefers exclusive submission of manuscripts. If an author has submitted the manuscript elsewhere or wishes to do so, the author should inform the Journal at the time of submission and notify the Journal immediately should the author accept another offer of publication. Because our articles undergo an anonymous, peer-review process before being offered an acceptance, it is unusual for the journal to be able to accommodate expedited reviews of under two weeks.

TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS

Manuscripts should be accompanied by (1) a cover letter summarizing the article and (2) the resume of the author, including telephone number and e-mail address. For major articles, LC&R will consider manuscripts from 5,000-10,000 words of text, and will consider submissions that are no more than15,000 words maximum, including footnotes. We prefer single-spaced submission, for readability purposes). For practice notes, LC&R recommends manuscripts of approximately 2,500 to 5,000 words of text, and up to 7,000 words maximum, including footnotes. All manuscripts must be prepared in Microsoft Word. LC&R follows the ALWD Citation Manual format for citations. If an accepted article is submitted in Blue Book format, the author will be responsible for converting the citations during the editing process. All accepted authors will be asked to provide copies of source materials that are unavailable through normal legal research methods.

HOW TO SUBMIT

Submissions should be sent electronically to the following e-mail address, directly or through the ALWD website: jalwd@alwd.org or online via Express-O.

PROCESS

LC&R is a peer-reviewed journal. All submissions that meet the mission of the journal are sent to anonymous peer reviewers.

About Us

ALWD is a non-profit professional association of directors of legal reasoning, research,writing, analysis, and advocacy programs from law schools throughout the United States, Canada and Australia. ALWD has more than 300 members representing more than 150 law schools.